1885-1933
Writer

Sportswriter.

Ringgold Wilmer Lardner was the last master of American vernacular humor. Born in Niles, Michigan, he briefly studied engineering; but newspapers were his college at a time when most American writers came out of the newsrooms. Starting as a sports reporter for the South Bend Times, in 1919 he took over "In the Wake of the News," the widely read Chicago Tribune sports column. Lardner filled his daily columns with verse, parody, and short fiction.

You Know Me Al.

In 1914 he published his first short story, "A Busher's Letters Home," which initiated the highly popular You Know Me Al series. These stories consist of quasi-literate letters written by an ignorant, boastful, dishonest, mean baseball pitcher. Known as the Busher stories, they established Lardner's reputation as a slang writer. H. L. Mencken observed in The American Language that "Lardner reports the common speech not...